‘We Will Adopt Your Baby’? No thanks – I wouldn’t want any child of mine to grow up with your views

The last kind of home I would want a baby to end up in is one in which the parents believe that women should be prevented from making choices about their own bodies

Of all the grotesque, frothy-mouthed, holier-than-thou pontificating over the Supreme Court’s devastating decision to remove the rights of women in the US to have an abortion, the very worst has to be those signs which read: WE WILL ADOPT YOUR BABY.

I winced, physically winced when I saw them – snapped and posted on Twitter as part of crowd footage of pro-choice vs “pro-life” (anti-abortion) rallies in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

There they stand, these identikit couples (and there are multiple), smiling earnestly into the camera, holding aloft signs that proudly, smugly shout: “Please don’t abort. We will adopt your baby!” The ones who hold them all have a sort of eerie, evangelical similarity – perhaps it’s put-on piousness, blinkered religious fervour or woefully misplaced, misguided celebration in the face of the very valid, very real concerns of millions of women whose lives will now be devastated, cut short and ruined.

Perhaps it’s the kind of vacant smile you wear as a symbol of zealous do-goodery that only works when you don’t (or won’t) face up to reality. Perhaps they really do mean it, mean well. But they may just as well have written “we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid”.

Oh, if only things were as simple as they seem to be in the heads of people who carry such damaging, pie-in-the-sky idealism written in Sharpie on a piece of cardboard! If we take them at face value, these seemingly nice, kind people; if they mean it for the right reasons, then they are at best naive, at worst utterly ignorant – and selfish.

Firstly, as so many with lived experience of these circumstances have pointed out, adoption is not the opposite to (or a solution for) abortion. Secondly, “forced birth and subsequent relinquishment benefits neither the biological parents nor the child”, as one powerful adoptee voice put it. It’s also worth noting that on any given day, there are more than 420,000 children in foster care in the US. Why haven’t these kids been adopted by evangelical couples who are seemingly oh so keen?

There are many more viewpoints that deserve to be heard, beyond the simple “life begins at conception” rhetoric peddled by pro-lifers, including the fact that adoption is being touted as a legal solution to a medical problem, when it can cause substantial trauma of its own.

I haven’t had an abortion. Would I, if I felt it was right for me and my family? In a heartbeat.

And I speak as a mother of two young children, whose responsibility it is to give them a moral steer, to model empathy and tolerance and open-hearted human compassion. I can say without pause for breath that the last kind of home I would wish any child of mine to end up in is a home in which the parents believe it is better to adopt than to provide safe and affordable access to abortion for women who need it. I’m sorry, no. I would not want any child to grow up with those views.

And kids do model their parents’ views, you see. Research tells us that, on the whole, parental attitudes, belief systems and thinking significantly impacts child-rearing, in a bidirectional way: with children influencing parents as well as parents influencing children. One study found that religious beliefs and practices have the potential to profoundly influence many aspects of life, including approaches to parenting.

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Other research shows us the effect of our own, role-modelled behaviour: data tells us that children whose caregivers smoke are four times as likely to take up smoking themselves; and children with parents who are problematic drinkers are at increased risk of alcohol and other drug use.

What we do as parents matters. How we talk to our kids matters. And I would not want any adult telling my child – if I lived in the US, couldn’t abort, and was thereby forced into a pregnancy I didn’t want – that I was wrong for doing so. That women like me, or like the millions who have had abortions, and who have spoken so powerfully and poignantly about it – were sinful. Women should never be guilt-tripped for making difficult, personal choices.

As someone put it perfectly: “I hate those signs held by smiling couples saying ‘we will adopt your baby’. In my crisis pregnancy, knowing that people would gladly take the baby away from me but not help me keep it was worse than the pressure to abort.”

Though one contrasting (and comforting) academic paper did find that less than half of all people in the United States adopt their parents’ political party affiliation – and it has been, overwhelmingly, gleeful Republicans “praising the lord” after the abortion ruling. At the very least, we can cling to research like that if any of these couples do end up adopting the children of those who are now no longer legally allowed an abortion.

Another relatively recent study showed that children who are raised to have strong beliefs are also more likely to push back against those views as they age – and thank god for that. Hopefully, these kids will rebel against their parents accordingly, vote Democrat and fight to put an end to this woeful, inglorious, unpatriotic and deeply sinister mess.